Budget Options for Recording Orchestras - Part 2: Custom and Shared Sessions

In order to calculate a budget for a recording session, it is necessary to know how much time you will actually need to record with the orchestra and what would be the best option to not end up with paying for session time that you don't use.

The general approach to booking an orchestra for recording would be on a "per session" basis. This means that you can only book them in blocks of three or four hours. In eastern European countries, four hour sessions are pretty common while in western Europe and the US it is more common to have a session length of three hours. This usually includes one or two breaks of 15 or 20 minutes each reducing the actual net recording time of such a session to something around 2.5 or 3.5 hours. In general you would be able to record 15-20 minutes of medium complex music in such a session. If you need to record in stems then this time will of course be reduced accordingly.

The obvious problem is that if you just need to record a few seconds or even just a couple of minutes of music, booking an entire session means that you will most likely not use all of the session time you booked and therefore waste money.

A few recording services (again, especially in eastern Europe) offer "half sessions" or recording by the hour. However this doesn't mean that the costs will be half. There are certain fixed costs per session that are not really depending on how many hours you record. This includes studio setup, instrumental rental etc. So booking a half session will only reduce costs by maybe a quarter, not half.

There is however another option that has become more and more popular over the last years which are so-called "Shared Session".

A shared session allows you to book a recording slot in a session and - as the name implies - share that session with other people who also only need to record a small amount of music. There are several providers that offer this sort of session, which handle all the organisational side of such shared sessions. So basically the only thing you need to provide to them is the score sheet and parts as PDF.

Known providers for such shared sessions would be:

Budapest Scoring:  https://www.budapestscoring.com/services/shared-sessions/ 

Dynamedion Open Sessions:  https://dynamedion.com/orchestra/ 

FAMES:  https://www.fames-project.com/ 

There are however several disadvantages with shared sessions over booking your own custom session:

With a shared session you are bound to the dates set by the providers, so if you need to record within a specific time span it might become impossible to record in a shared session if none of the providers have recordings planned in that time. Also, these shared sessions usually come with a fixed line up. Most providers allow to book additional players but they come at a standard per-session price which can quickly eat up the savings of using a shared session model. So if you need a specific non-standard line-up shared sessions might not be the best way.

Also, the span of a financial benefit of such shared sessions over booking a custom session is usually quite limited and usually anything above five minutes of music might be cheaper to do in a custom session.

The respective prices for shared session slots can be looked up or requested at the links above.

My personal experiences with shared sessions are that they usually deliver a quite decent result and the services are usually very customer friendly. However be aware that none of the top orchestras in the world offer such services so the orchestras you get are solid but you should not expect a world class recording.

In the next parts I will focus on specific recording providers and locations and give you price estimates and talk about my experiences with them.